Sunday, August 30, 2009

Going Broke on $50,000: Median household Budget

Going Broke on $50,000: The Story of the Struggling American Middle Class. The $50,000 Median Household Budget.
Posted by mybudget360 in Employment, baby boomers, banks, budget, debt, economy, frugal, government, income, investing, recession, retirment planning, savings, wealth preservation
3 Comment
..The recent recession is exposing how many American families have been treading on the edge. Problems were already in the system before the recession began but the downturn in the economy was the ultimate catalyst. Many families were using credit cards as a means of supplementing a decade of stagnant wages. The median household income for the entire country is $50,740. In addition we have 34,000,000 Americans now receiving some form of food stamps. They are not part of the middle class group. Yet when we dig deeper into the data, it is clear why so many Americans are going broke on $50,000 a year


Norton's comment: And now you know why it is a struggle! And it is going to get worse so start preparing.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Until the median wage improves, there will be no recovery


Jesse's Café Américain: "Until the median wage improves, there will be no recovery"

Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine | Marketplace From American Public Media


Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine | Marketplace From American Public Media: "The Upside
Upside: Fix-it man is doing fine
Not everyone has the money to buy a new refrigerator or washing machine. So when large appliances break, people call on repairman David Khorsandi to get their machines back in working order. He explains why his phone has been ringing non-stop"

Norton's comment: This could be my Plan B..........keeping food on the table. No bad!

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts: Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Paul Craig Roberts: Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs: "The great American superpower and its 300 million people are being driven straight into the ground by the narrow interest of the big banks and the munitions industry. People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars"

Norton's comment: Ugh! this rings true. Being led to our demise by gullibility and fear mongering and the illusion of a Great matho American ego.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Is Obama Punking Us? - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Is Obama Punking Us? - NYTimes.com: "What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media."

Norton: this is a good summary of the pervasive ill-ease that many of us feel about the conduct of the fixes that are moving forward: the economic, health, sustainable energy promotions... most seem still rooted in the same power mechanisms on wall st and corporate board rooms, and congressional behavior that got us to this disaster in the first place. And then we have the Republicans that are doing their best to throw gasoline on the fires of change.
Obama is right. Our current course, be it economics, deficit, national debt, health care is unsustainable. It seems to me that public education is lacking to discern truth from the fear mongering that helps to sustain the unsustainable status quo. It is the status quo which continues to feed the benefits for the few in power to the jeopardy of the many. This country was build on the middle class. The bulk of economic growth and stability is based on the middle class and a strong small business development. These are NOT the sectors benefiting from these fixes. Additionally, the effectiveness of our voting public depends on an educated voter; that is, one that can source out the TRUTH in a barrage of third and fourth hand information sources that are designed to manipulate the public perception of TRUTH when people are NOT well equipped to think critically and discover the primary sources of information without all the fear mongering of hyper-talk.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Oil and Base Metals Keep Pace With Stocks

August 12, 2009

By Arthur Hill
The PerfChart below shows the key commodity related ETFs and the S&P 500 since early March. As the stock market surged, the US Oil Fund ETF (USO) and the Base Metals ETF (DBB) were the only two commodity ETFs able to keep pace. The Natural Gas ETF (UNG) remains the weakest of the group - by far

Squeezing the oligarchs ... in the USA!

Jesse's Café Américain: If You Read Nothing Else About the Financial Crisis Read (and Remember) This...:
"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time."

"...The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights...Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support..."
Read the complete essay here. Atlantic Monthly May 09 "the Quiet Coup"

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about the author: "Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He blogs about the financial crisis at baselinescenario.com, along with James Kwak, who also contributed to this essay."

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Mega-Bear with the S&P since 2000

Mega-Bear with the S&P since 2000 by dshort.com:

by Norton:

So where do we go from here?

If you can wait awhile and tolerate potential drop in oil and commodities in the interim, then it seems that the LT future for various commodities (hard assets) looks the best by category and may outpace even blue chip and tech sector favorites.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Generations X and Y - amongst the crash's hidden losers

EBAY | SnapshotThe crash's hidden losers [The Philadelphia Inquirer]BY Knight Ridder/Tribune
— 12:06 PM ET 08/05/2009
Aug. 5--Will someone please tell me how this happened?

I'm not talking about Jon and Kate and their troubled televised marriage. Or Arlen, Joe and their congressional cage match -- two recent attention grabbers in the ignore-the-economy media swirl.

I'm talking about something that's not all over the news, but all over the nation, and hitting particularly hard, in my opinion, at Generations X and Y.

I'm talking about how middle-class life, and its promise of generational upward mobility, is unraveling before today's younger workers have had the chance to collect even a fraction of their due.

I'm talking about you! You're invisible . . . to policymakers, to the media, to yourselves. And many of you seem more worried about Jon, Kate and the kids.

Even if you've done all that your parents, teachers or college mentors told you to do back in the bullish '80s and '90s, even before you've hit your dreaded 40th birthday, you're scared that life won't be better than your parents', after all.

Panicking, dare I say, in a way that the previous generation was not at your age.

I hear you. I am you. But I have not been reading much about you or us, frankly. Consider this your shot, our shot, at trumping Jon and Kate.

First, let's all agree that the damage from last fall's stock market crash -- from pulverized retirement accounts to prodigious unemployment numbers -- has affected a large cross-section of Americans, from Baby Boomers on down to high school graduates.

And yes, there is acute strain on middle-class workers in their 50s, who are losing the good-paying jobs they had held for decades just as college tuition bills are rolling in for their children's educations.

But a more pernicious trend less in the news is that of workers in their early 40s, 30s and 20s, many of whom have been forced out of jobs before they could fully capitalize on careers.

They are being bounced mid-stream in their prime, before pocketing the wage hikes, promotions, pensions, perks, etc., that had characterized employment before the jobs scene became a game of musical chairs.

And unlike those older than us, our generation is experiencing this with less of a safety net for what's ahead.

The story line goes something like this: You've been laid off from a job where the only pension plan was either eliminated before you got there or whacked back a few years into your tenure. A 401(k)? Yes. A match? Dream on. A wage hike? When you hit your 30s, your time will come for that.

You were laid off at age 28, 35, or, in the case of one old college pal last year, just before your 40th birthday. You find a new job at less pay, only to fear another layoff may be just around the corner. You've been there before. You can smell it. You're a veteran now.

You buy a used minivan off eBay (EBAY

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) while cramming prerequisites at night for a new career, where you humbly hope to be a newbie at the bottom of the pay scale in a few years.

What this means is a lot of lost wages in your prime. Savings you'll never save, cash you'll never get to spend.

How's this for a kicker: By retirement, as some predict, Social Security will have gone completely dry from paying all the workers ahead of you.

Yeah. Good stuff, as the kids say.

So what do you do with all this? Who do you turn to for help?

Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who has written on the precarious condition of the middle class, told my colleague Jeff Gelles recently that government isn't paying attention to people like you.

"There is no one in Washington -- no agency -- whose principal responsibility is the consumer, or watching out for the economic health of the American family. No one," Warren said in a June article.

The way to cope, for now, must be a cross between Darwinian survival and playing the slots: Scrap and scrape. Cut your expenses, slash your expectations for life (fingers crossed) and hope it all works out so that someone, somewhere, is there to take care of you when you're old.

If that's not enough, Jon and Kate invite you into their dysfunctional lives again this year. Join them, why don't you. All the kids are doing it.

------

Mike Armstrong is away. Contact Maria Panaritis at 215-854-2431 or mpanaritis@phillynews.com.

To see more of The Philadelphia Inquirer, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.philly.com/inquirer.

Copyright (c) 2009, The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Norton: this is so depressing, I hesitate to talk about it with my adult children. Note though it is much of what I as an early boomer have gone through my entire working life in the 1970 through current and beyond.But it is NOT what I wanted for my children and their children! Ugh!

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Rail traffic: The economic indicator that's not improving

Rail traffic: The economic indicator that's not improving: "If you're skeptical of the economic data that pundits tout as a sign the economy is starting to recover, you're not alone. In fact, you might have one very good reason to believe that economic activity is still tepid and is not showing signs of improvement. Stock research house Zacks points out that rail traffic, a direct indicator of economic activity, hasn't recovered at all.
Rail shipments in the last four weeks are down 18.6 percent compared to 2008, which is comparable to the 18.8 percent year-to-date decline versus the same period in 2008."

Norton: It is not over yet.